How Popsa curates your Memories

Our camera rolls aren’t a pristine series of high quality photos. They’re a busy collection of memories, screenshots, duplicates and more, which can make it difficult to separate the meaningful from the mundane. We’re all familiar with searching for a particular photo, only to finally find it and then having to decide which one from a burst of five is worth keeping. Popsa Memories brings this time-consuming process to an end.

Every Memory, whether it’s a Rewind, Journey or Portrait, is a curated selection of photos made for you. It’s all done on device, which means your photos never leave your phone and stay completely private. Here, we explain how Popsa picks and chooses your best photos, without ever actually seeing them.

How Popsa Memories selects standout images

It’s actually your phone that does the heavy lifting, which is how your photos always remain private. Our mobile devices recognise a lot about a photo: whether it’s sharp and well lit; one of a burst of 10 near-identical photos; an image of a beach or screenshot of a spreadsheet. All the Popsa system receives is a little set of notes about each photo, known as metadata. This includes when and approximately where it was taken and how it scored on quality – using this information we can build a Memory.

There are 20 measures of photo quality alone, including composition, lighting and focus, but there’s certain signals we look for to mark whether a picture is worth keeping. This could be the people in your life who matter, a place that’s away from your everyday locations or simply a photo you’ve favourited – because you’re the best judge of your own memories. Rich, detailed photos will always rise to the top of our algorithm, whereas near-empty frames and quick practical snaps – photos of passports – sink. We blend all these factors into a single score for each photo, then AI starts curating.

A great Popsa Memory isn’t just the top 10 photos scored, it needs to tell a story. A weekend away should feel like a whole weekend, with different scenes, subjects and faces – not just one sunset multiple times. So our technology groups photos into moments and trips by time and place, then deliberately chooses for variety to build an accurate narrative of what happened.

Five reasons why a photo might not make the cut

• You took several almost-identical shots. We show the best one and tuck the rest away (don’t worry, they’re still there under “Show More”).

• It’s not really a memory. Screenshots, receipts and photos of your laptop screen all get filtered out, because they’re not worth reliving.

• Some places we leave alone. Out of respect, we deliberately never build Memories around locations that might be sensitive.

• It’s a forwarded image, not a moment. Photos saved from messaging apps are gently put to the side – they’re usually not even yours, so we leave them in the past.

• It’s too small to shine. Very low-resolution images that wouldn’t display or print well are set aside to prevent a poor quality keepsake.

Even a beautiful photo can sometimes be left out to keep the story of your album clear. If you capture something you really love, however, favourite the photo in your library and our technology will listen. Download the Popsa app today to start your Memories journey.